'Bantu' 'Stephen Biko (Dec. 18, 1946–Sept. 12, 1977) - Gone But Not Forgotten

 

 

'Bantu' Stephen Biko was one of South Africa's most significant political activists who was strongly against the apartheid system and the white minority rule in South Africa. He was  born in Tarkastad in the Eastern Province (now Eastern Cape) on 18 December 1946, the third child of Mzingaye Biko and Nokuzola Macethe Duna. Mzingaye worked as a policeman, and later as a clerk in the King William’s Town Native Affairs office. An intelligent man, he was also enrolled at the University of South Africa (UNISA), the distance-learning university, but did not complete enough courses to get his law degree before he died. In 1948, the family moved to Ginsberg Township, just outside of King William’s Town in today's Eastern Cape. The Bikos eventually owned their own house in Zaula Street in the Brownlee section of Ginsberg - this despite Nokuzola's meagre income as a domestic worker. 

From an early age, Steve Biko showed an interest in anti-apartheid politics. After being expelled from his first school, Lovedale College in the Eastern Cape, for "anti-establishment" behavior. such as speaking out against apartheid and speaking up for the rights of Black South African citizens. he was transferred to St. Francis College, a Roman Catholic boarding school in Natal. From there he enrolled as a medical  student at the University of Natal Medical School (in the university's Black Section).

While at medical school, Biko became involved with the National Union of South African Students. The union was dominated by White liberal allies and failed to represent the needs of Black students. Dissatisfied, Biko resigned in 1969 and founded the South African Students' Organisation. SASO was involved in providing legal aid and medical clinics, as well as helping to develop cottage industries for disadvantaged Black communities and combatting  the minority government’s racist apartheid policies and to promote Black identity. In 1972, he helped found and lead the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) alongside fellow activists, Dr. Mamphela Ramphele and Barney Pityana.  and in the next year was banned from politics by the Afrikaner government.

 The BCM was an anti-apartheid movement that filled the power void when the ANC and Pan African Congress leaders were banished and jailed and was founded as a direct result of the Sharpeville Massacre https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2021/03/remembering-sharpeville-massacre.html in the late 1960s. The massacre saw around 300 South African police open fire on unarmed civilians who were peacefully marching against the apartheid pass laws a regulation that required Black people and other people of colour to carry a pass book whenever travelling so that the government could monitor their movements. 

The movement sought to empower young Black South Africans and inspire them to break themselves free from the chains of white governance. The BCM helped with the empowerment and mobilisation of Black people in urban areas. During the struggle Biko gave South Africans hope for a better future, he never gave up and he fought for what he believed to be right. As he once said  “The greatest weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed"

In September 1977, Biko was arrested for subversion. While in police custody in Port Elizabeth, Biko was brutally beaten and then driven 700 miles to Pretoria, where he was thrown into a cell. On September 12, 1977, he died naked and shackled on the filthy floor of a police hospital. News of the political killing, denied by the country’s white minority government, led to international protests and a U.N.-imposed arms embargo.

Biko's funeral  was marked by passionate denunciations of the apartheid regime, and became something of a political rally, lasting more than six hours. Mourners thrust their fists into the air and shouted ‘Power!’ when Steve’s coffin was lowered into the grave.

Soon after Steve’s death, the state banned 18 organisations on 17 October 1977, the majority of them allied to the BCM. The BCM launched the Azanian People's Organisation (AZAPO) in 1979, but the organisation was also banned soon thereafter. By the early 1980s the Black Consciousness Movement was in decline, eclipsed by the re-emergence of the Congress movement, most notably in the shape of the United Democratic Front. Steve’s dream of uniting the various liberation organisations never came to fruition; rather, the Congress Movement took the reins of the anti-apartheid struggle and eventually the ANC became the ruling party after the first democratic elections in 1994.

In Pretoria on Dec 2 the Stephen Biko inquest ended  that absolved the security police and all others involved of any responsibility for the death in prison of the country's foremost young black leader. Demonstrations began outside the court. 

Although his death was attributed to "a prison accident," evidence presented during the 15-day inquest into Biko's death revealed otherwise. During his detention in a Port Elizabeth police cell he had been chained to a grill at night and left to lie in urine-soaked blankets. He had been stripped naked and kept in leg-irons for 48 hours in his cell. A blow in a scuffle with security police led to him suffering brain damage by the time he was driven naked and manacled in the back of a police van to Pretoria, where he died.

In 1995, after the peaceful transfer to majority rule in South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to examine decades of apartheid policy and to address the widespread call for justice for those who abused their authority under the system. However, as a condition of the transfer of power, the outgoing white minority government requested that the commission be obligated to grant amnesty to people making full confessions of politically motivated crimes during apartheid. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu was appointed to head the commission, which was soon criticized by many South Africans for its apparent willingness to grant pardons.

In early 1997, four former police officers, including Police Colonel Gideon Nieuwoudt, appeared before the commission and admitted to killing Stephen Biko two decades earlier. The commission agreed to hear their request for political amnesty but in 1999 refused to grant amnesty because the men failed to establish a political motive for the brutal killing. Other amnesty applications are still in progress.

In 1978, a few months after Steve Biko’s death, Stevie Wonder called and asked Millard Arnold if he would accept the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured Peoples’ (NAACP) Image Award for Biko posthumously. Arnold was flown out to Los Angeles for the Eleventh Annual NAACP Image Award celebration at which he accepted the Stevie Wonder Perpetual Award in Biko’s honour. This is the poem Arnold wrote and read for the event.

 

They tell me Steve Biko is dead 
To persuade me perhaps that his strong but sensitive voice can be stilled by hatred and fear
They tell me Steve Biko is dead
To show me perhaps that humanity and dignity can be bludgeoned into submission
They tell me Steve Biko is dead
To convince me perhaps that courage and compassion can be somehow compromised 
But what they are afraid to tell me is that Biko lives
That the spirit, the ideals, the dreams, the glory of Steve Biko lives
That it lives in Soweto
That it lives in Watts
That it lives in Harlem
That it lives in the minds of all those oppressed
Steve Biko lives because the aspirations of a people cannot be denied
Steve Biko lives because violence and repression will not quench the thirst for freedom and decency
Steve Biko lives because his special sense of humanity and integrity cannot be forgotten
But they, they would have me, they would have you believe that Steve Biko is dead
You and I…
We know better

 

 Many of Biko's writings were posthumously collected in the 1978 anthology I Write What I Like. It is compulsory reading for everyone – especially as a way of understanding his nuanced theories and expositions of racial inequality and racist violence. In the preface to this collection, the editor Aelred Stubbs grappled with Biko’s passing, suggesting that while it was difficult to directly comment ‘in depth about his death’ or to begin writing a biography of him, Biko’s teachings were desperately needed: they were, and sadly continue to be, ‘timely, [as they] serve to inform those who all over the world know the name Biko only in the dreadful context of his death’. There are haunting echoes of what his happening, ‘all over the world’, today.

Before his untimely death in detention at age 30, he was instrumental in uniting Black Africans in the struggle against the apartheid government in South Africa. His place in history is firmly cemented and the struggle that he gave his life for continues. He left a legacy of thoughts and words, and these words pay tribute to the courage and power of the young leader who was to become one of Africa’s heroes.

 Internationally, many years after his death, Bantu Stephen Biko is memorialized as one of the most important activists of South Africa’s apartheid era, but in his hometown he is remembered as “Big Brother Bantu.”

 In Xhosa, one of South Africa’s 11 official languages, “Bantu” means “the people’s person.” Those who knew Biko said it was a name that described him well, according to Nkosinathi Biko, CEO of the Steve Biko Foundation and the eldest of Biko’s four children.

It has been many years  since the police arrested, interrogated and beat Biko with enough force to cause his death,yet the former medical student has not been forgotten. Biko became not just a hero of South Africa’s liberation struggle, but a universal symbol of resistance against oppression, with his memory praised in films, (1987's Cry Freedom, for instance) books and songs. " In popular culture, he remains  a very powerful symbol of hope … an icon of change,” Biko’s son Nkosinathi once said. “He helped to articulate our understanding, our own identity that continues to resonate in young South Africans to this day.“His ideas have a real influence well beyond the political field, in cultural organisations, in research organisations and in churches.”

Nelson Mandela  South Africa's post-Apartheid president who was incarcerated at the notorious Robben Island prison during Biko's time on the world stage, lionized the activist 20 years after he was killed, calling him "the spark that lit a veld fire across South Africa."

Biko’s brutal murder had a palpable impact on South Africa and the rest of the world, sounding a forceful wake-up call to non-Black citizens who wilfully overlooked the inhumane cruelty of apartheid. As well as impacting the politics of well-known figures like Nelson Mandela, Biko continues to be a source of inspiration today; his name has been leant to numerous organisations including the Steve Biko Foundation which has developed projects like Accelerate Hub to support young people across Africa.Movements like Black Lives Matter carry forward  versions  of ‘grass-roots’ organisations for which Biko advocated. They challenge anti-Black racism – in the US, the UK, and across the world – by unapologetically stressing the worthiness, the importance, and the value of each individual Black life existing within a system which derides all Black experiences as a whole. Black Consciousness remains a vital lens through which these ideas are being conveyed. In fact, Steve Biko was the great-uncle of Cherno Biko, the founder of Black Trans Lives Matters. 

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” -  Steve Biko

Here;s Peter Gabriel’s haunting 1980 song Biko:

 

 

“You can blow out a candle

But you can’t blow out a fire.

0nce the flames begin to catch

The wind will blow it higher.”

 

Sources : 

 

Biko, Steve. I Write What I Like. Bowerdean Press, 1978. 

 

“Cry Freedom.” IMDb, IMDb.com, 6 Nov. 1987. 

 

“Steve Biko: The Philosophy of Black Consciousness." Black Star News, 20 Feb. 2020. 

 

Donald Woods. Biko. Paddington Press, 1978.